No GPS? No satellite TV? No radar? Russia and China say they have found ways to boost their own signals — and jam others.
Northern European nations have this year been complaining of unexplained ‘outages’ of vital GPS systems. Now we know it was actually a secret experiment with the Chinese to modify the Earth’s atmosphere — to boost and jam vital signals.
Scientists have revealed the existence of the project in a research paper published in the Chinese journal Earth and Planetary Physics.
According to the South China Morning Post, it describes how a specific layer of the Earth’s atmosphere over Europe was ‘modified’ to test the military application of the technology.
The interaction of the sun and cosmic rays with Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic sphere creates a variable layer of free-floating, positively charged ions some 75km to 1000km above the surface. This layer reflects radio waves, enabling transmissions such as short-wave radio and some radars to travel long distances.
The over-the-horizon radar project at Jindalee. A powerful array of microwave antennas in Russia has been used to ‘heat’ the ionosphere, causing signals from GPS satellites to be jammed.
Depending on its state due to ‘space weather’ — such as solar storms — it can also serves as a barrier to signals attempting to pass through it.
“The militaries have been in a race to control the ionosphere for decades,” the South China Morning Post asserts.
Reportedly, a 500km-high portion of the ionosphere was ‘heated’ five times in June. One test, on June 7, caused some 126,000 sqkm of the sky — roughly equivalent to half the size of Britain — to flare with energy.